


i wish i could carry your smile in my heart

by TheJGatsby



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, some kylux mention as a Plot Point but hux isn't actually in it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 02:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7462602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben's supposed to be marrying someone else, and Rey doesn't think she can handle it. Fate has other ideas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wish i could carry your smile in my heart

**Author's Note:**

> Just, like, for clarity so I don't hurt anyone unsuspectingly- Hux isn't really a sympathetic character here? Like he's not the villain but he's also not a fave. Hardcore kylux multishippers beware.  
> Title from All Out of Love by Air Supply, because I love it unironically

 

Rey crumples another sheet of paper, throws it at the garbage can on top of an almost comical pile of failed attempts. Her head pounds, dearly hungover from his bachelor party, and she pulls out her phone to text her best friend.

_ I hope you’re in better shape than I am _ .

She doesn’t lock it, because Ben always responds to her immediately, because she set her text tone on his phone to a line from the chorus of that song “Boom Clap” like two years ago because he absolutely hated it and then he just never changed it. Sure enough, less than a minute later, she gets a text from “the Baen” (Poe’s doing, that one).

_ I don’t know, you’re pretty shredded. _

She grins and types out  _ You know it _ , followed by a bunch of flexing emojis, and then she honestly wants to cry, because this is what she’s leaving behind, because she’s  _ losing _ this, because she’s losing  _ him _ , so she doesn’t send it.

She opens up her conversation with Finn and sends him every angry and crying and upset emoji she can find, then,  _ Why is he getting married!!! This is dumb!!! He is dumb!!! Hux is dumb!!! _

A moment later, her phone rings.

“You know, it’s not too late to change your mind,” he says.

“Yes it is,” she responds, dropping her head miserably onto her desk. “Every part of this situation sucks.”

“I know, Sunshine. I’m sorry.”

“At least he’s happy,” she sighs, twirling her pen between her fingers.

“Yeah,” Finn replies, hollow. “At least there’s that.”

Neither of them believe it for a minute.

 

Ben stares in the mirror, shirt unbuttoned and untucked, bowtie in his hand, out of sorts and out of order and out of time to think about whether he is making the right choice.

_ It’s just cold feet _ , says part of him.

_ If you were making the right choice you wouldn’t be wondering about it, _ says another.

Most of him is silent, waiting, anxious. The stainless steel engagement ring, inlaid with red and black stones, just as he would have chosen for himself, glints in the light as he twists it on his finger, and his stomach twists.  _ It’s perfect _ , he’d said to Armitage, presenting it on bent knee.  _ Too perfect _ , he’d thought to himself a hundred times since.

(It felt, to him, like a furniture-store showroom- completely flawless, precisely suited, and utterly soulless. Nothing in the ring reminded him of Armitage, there was nothing to say  _ there, that’s from him, that’s the man I’m going to marry _ .)

He tugs the ring off his finger, just to see how it feels, and hates the sense of relief. Overwhelmed, he flings it out of his hand and watches it sail through the air, hit the wall, roll under the dresser. After another small eternity staring in the mirror, at his un-engaged self, he sighs and goes to retrieve it, but when he kneels, he glances over at his packed honeymoon suitcase and sees an envelope wedged into it, hidden from plain view, but likely to be found once the suitcase was moved.

He tugs it out, recognizes his name in Rey’s familiar, scratchy handwriting on the back, tears it open.

_ Dear Ben, _

_ By the time you read this, you’ll be married, and let me just say- congratulations. I’m so incredibly happy for you, that you’ve found someone you can spend the rest of your life with, someone who makes you so happy _ .

Ben’s stomach lurches, and he tries not to examine it.

_ Let me first apologize for the fact that I wasn’t at the wedding. I know I should have been, and I’m sorry, and I wish I could have been, but frankly, I’m not strong enough to watch you marry him. _

He stares at the line, reads it again. And again. He squints at it, his hands shaking slightly even as he holds the letter, and reads it again, hoping that this time it might make sense.

He doesn’t realize till it hits him she isn’t planning on being there how much he was counting on Rey sitting in the front row, depending on the fact that he could just look at her and she’d offer him that same bright, encouraging grin-

He drops the letter and sits back hard against the wall.

 

“Let me  _ list _ ,” Rey slurred two nights previous, falling into a seat and leaning heavily on Poe’s shoulder, “all the reasons Ben should super extra mega not be marrying Hux.”

“I already know them,” Poe said with a weak grin, his lack of enthusiastic good humor speaking volumes to how deeply it hurt him to see one of his closest friends like that- roaring drunk so she could pretend the party she was at wasn’t celebrating the wedding of the man she loves to someone else.

“Number one,” she said, plowing forward and ignoring him, “Hux doesn’t  _ respect _ him. He’s always… he treats him like a kid, or a dumbass, or someone who can’t make decisions for himself, an’- an’ he has no  _ patience _ with Ben an’ you  _ gotta _ have patience with him, y’know, Poe? He just- he can be such a  _ mess _ , an’ he’s gotta know you still love him when he’s a mess, an’ you love him after he’s a mess, an’ Hux is just… like, Ben gets the way he gets an’ Hux is just like, okay, are you done now? This is, this is, it’s  _ inappropriate _ and  _ ill-mannered _ and you must cease  _ immediately _ an’ it’s just like, fuck, Hux, we all know you’re the most got-it-together collected fuck-off in the universe, but we can’t all be, fuckin’, picture perfect soldiers or whatever. Fuck.”

“Christ, you’re trashed,” Poe sighed, wrapping an arm around her shoulder.

“Number two,” Rey continued, snuggling closer to him. “He’s only marrying him ‘cause Hux is rich an’ successful an’ political an’ Ben’s parents hate him. Those aren’t good reasons to marry someone, Poe, those are really  _ shitty _ reasons.” She poked him in the side. “ _ Shitty _ fuckin’ reasons. Number three… number three is… fuck, I don’t wanna talk about number three.”

Poe squeezed her shoulder, and reason number three sat heavy in the air between them.  _ He’d be better with me instead _ lay unsaid behind Rey’s lips, on the tip of her tongue, where it lives every time she looks at Ben, next to  _ I love you, you know _ and  _ why are you so blind? _

“It’s his life,” Poe said to her, thumb stroking along the skin bared by her sleeveless top. “If he wants to marry Hux, that’s his choice, and we’re his friends, and we support him, remember?”

“I know,” she said miserably, tears pricking at the back of her eyes. “I just….”

“Yeah,” Poe said, wrapping his other arm around her as she started to cry. “I know, Sunshine.”

As if summoned, Ben approached just then, cheerful expression vanishing at the sight of Rey’s face buried in Poe’s arm, her shoulders shaking. “Is she okay?” he asked, reaching towards her.

“Yeah, she just had too much to drink, I’m gonna take her home, okay?” Poe tugged Rey to her feet, and Ben jumped forward to help.

“Let me-”

“No, it’s fine,” Poe said, pulling Rey away. “Stay. Enjoy your party.” He flashed Ben a smile. “We’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”

“Okay,” Ben said quietly, watching them leave.

 

_ Let me explain _ , continues the letter, once Ben has collected himself enough to keep reading,  _ by making a confession. I know that I should have told you this earlier, years ago, probably, when I first realized, or any of the infinite opportunities I’ve had since then, but every time, I thought another time would be better, more perfect, more right, and now you’re marrying him and it’s too late. _

_ So let me confess, then, that I am in love with you. _

His breath catches, and he reads that line again, and his chest hurts, but not the way it hurts when he looks at his ring or thinks about the rest of his life- it feels like the time she was sixteen and pretended she wouldn’t miss him when he left home, and when she was eighteen and dragged him to her first college party because she wanted to feel safe, or when she was twenty and found out who her parents were and cried on him for an hour because they’d abandoned her and for another because she had a family she’d never met and for another because she somehow she couldn’t manage to stop. It hurts like every time she sleeps at his place and they argue over who takes the couch- because she’s the guest but he’s too tall for it- and the times he let the phrase  _ we can both sleep in the bed _ make it all the way to his teeth before he bit it off and killed it, like leftovers in his fridge he didn’t make with a little note on top on days his head is too full to move and too empty to think about things like food, like two toothbrushes on his bathroom counter because that’s just the way it is, just the way it’s always been. It hurts like the way he looked at her and thought  _ maybe _ , thought  _ definitely _ , thought  _ oh, yes, it’s you _ .

And then he remembers she is apologizing, not rejoicing, and it hurts like the day Armitage asked him out and he said yes thinking if fate and courage hadn’t done anything maybe it wasn’t meant to be, and the way every day since has felt like a tiny betrayal. He keeps reading.

_ If you could see all the other drafts of this letter, you’d laugh- there are ones where I go on pages and pages like Mr. Darcy, essays about longing, they were really something _ .

He wants to tell her no, he wouldn’t laugh, he would treasure every word and write her back twice as many.

_ But the point is simple. I’m in love with you, I have been for years, for longer than I care to think about, and I never said anything, and for that I’m both sorry and glad. Sorry because it still feels like a missed opportunity, but glad because at least this way we’re friends, we never took a risk and lost something precious, and you’re happy with him. _

Ben wants to scream.

_ That brings me around again to your wedding- frankly, I would have been a mess if I’d been there. I probably would have cried, and I almost definitely would have stood up and tried to object, like something out of a movie, and it would have been embarrassing for everyone. I’m certain the ceremony was beautiful, and the party was fantastic- Poe never fails to plan a good party. _

_ I don’t want to keep you too long, because you’ve got a honeymoon to attend to, but I have one last thing to say. By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. Frankly, watching you plan your wedding has been painful, and now that it’s over and done, I need to leave for a while, take some time to heal, so I’m going to visit my grandfather. I’ll probably be back in a month or two, but in the meantime please don’t try to reach me. I love you dearly, you know that, but I need space. _

It feels like a nightmare, and he drops the letter in favor of his phone, punching in Rey’s speed dial. It goes to voicemail. He tries it three more times, and every time straight to voicemail, so he orders an Uber to the airport instead, pacing desperately as the screen tells him cheerfully that the nearest car is ten minutes away. He sits back down on the floor, picks up the letter again.

_ I hope you won’t be too upset now- I really didn’t want to ruin your wedded bliss, and I want you to understand that this doesn’t change anything. We’re still best friends, and everything will be just like it’s always been once I get back. _

That’s the last thing he wants, now.

_ But I need this, and I need you to understand that I need this, and I need you to understand that it’s nothing you’ve done, it’s all me. So I’ll see you then, okay? Have a good honeymoon. _

_ Love, _

_ Rey _

He manages to read it four more times before the driver gets there, and then he’s outside with nothing but the letter in his hand.

The driver, whose name is Jessika, stares at him for a second.

“Dude, are you running away from your wedding or something?”

“Yes, can we go?”

Her hand hovers over the gear shift. “Yeah, sure, it’s your life, but did you at least tell your fiance?”

Ben wants to hit himself. No, he hadn’t. “Give me, like, one minute?” He runs back into the house, digs his ring out from where it had rolled under the dresser, and scrawls a quick note for Armitage.

_ I’m sorry _ , it says,  _ I just can’t. _

He leaves the ring and the note on top of the dresser, knowing Armitage will come looking, knowing he’ll probably just grit his teeth and sigh and be over it, because he seems to think he’s above feeling things and that always bothered Ben like a hundred thousand other things did and he wants to laugh with relief that he’s  _ leaving _ .

“So what’s the story?” Jessika asks, grinning like a kid in a candy shop.

“None of your business,” Ben says, but then his phone is buzzing with a reminder about the wedding and she’s looking down at it before he has the chance to swipe it away.

“Hey, is that Poe Dameron?” she asks, gesturing to his lock screen.

“Yeah, you know him?” Ben replies, much preferring this to the other line of questioning.

“We work together, he’s great- oh my god, wait, are you Ben who’s marrying Hux even though he really super shouldn’t be?”

Ben flinches. “I’m not anymore, am I?”

“I’ve heard a lot about you, specifically all the reasons you shouldn’t be marrying Hux.”

He grins wryly, not nearly as bothered by that as he should be. “Yeah? What are they?”

“There’s three big ones, but Poe says your friend Rey could literally talk for hours about how wrong you two are for each other.”

Ben’s breath catches in his throat again. Of course she could. Rey seems to always know him better than he knows himself, and whenever he makes the wrong choice she always seems to see the disaster coming, but she never tries to dissuade him. Sometimes he wishes she would.

“What are the big three?” he asks, morbidly curious.

“Hux doesn’t respect you,”  she lists. He grimaces- it’s not necessarily incorrect, Armitage seemed to view him as a fixer-upper at best and a tiresome burden at worst. “You’re marrying him for the wrong reasons,” she continues, and it’s even more true. He realizes he always said yes to Armitage because it felt like the right thing to do- they’d been together two years, they were both at good points in their careers, it was like a textbook version of a timely proposal, there was no reason to say no except that the thought of spending the rest of his life with Armitage made his guts turn uncomfortably. “And- um,” Jessika cuts herself off, darting her eyes over at him.

“What?” he asks, raising an eyebrow at her. “You’ve already verbally decimated my three-year relationship, don’t start pulling punches now.”

“Yeah, but this one’s not about you, it’s… someone else loves you and thinks you’d be better with them, is all.”

Ben runs his finger over his name on the envelope. “Rey?” he murmurs, staring at his hands.

“Yeah, but she’d never try to stop you doing something she thinks is making you happy, so last I heard she’s leav- oh my god, you’re going after her, aren’t you?” Jessika nearly swerves into another lane she sits up so quickly. “Do we need to stop by the florist? Do the real rom-com airport thing?”

Ben gapes at her. “I- no, there’s no time.”

She seems like she might squeal. “Oh my god, this is so romantic, it’s like a movie, I’m in a real-life Meg Ryan movie, holy  _ shit _ .”

Ben grins. “Yeah, it is pretty romantic, isn’t it?”

When they pull up to the airport, Ben practically sprints out of the door towards the gate. He looks up at the departures board, and there’s only three flights going where Rey’s headed, one that left at 7 AM, one that left ten minutes ago, and one that doesn’t leave for another four hours. He has a sick feeling he knows which one she was on, but he runs to the information desk anyway.

“Hi, can you tell me if someone was on a flight? Rey Kenobi, flight 2187.”

The chipper airport employee taps at her keyboard, and then smiles at him. “Yep, she’s on it, they should be taking off right about now.”

His head drops into his hands and he wants to scream. He was so close, and-

“Can you get me a ticket on the next flight out?”

She smiles brightly again. “Of course! Name?”

 

The rocking chairs creak softly on the porch as Rey stares down at her now-cooled and only half-drunk mug of tea.

“And the worst part is that… right up until the plane took off, I was- I don’t know, waiting, hoping, fantasizing? I don’t know. I kept thinking maybe I’d look up and he’d be there, holding a bouquet, like something out of a movie, but….”

Obi-Wan reaches out and sets a comforting hand on her knee. “The heart is not always as wise as we’d like it to be, Rey.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “My heart’s pretty dumb, isn’t it?”

Obi-Wan sits back in his chair. “Unlucky, perhaps.”

“That’s for sure.”

A yellow taxi comes trundling up the road, stops at the end of the long drive. “My, I’m just getting a whole horde of visitors today, aren’t I?” Obi-Wan says, with that old-man cheerfulness that disguises a hint of irritation. He’s lived alone for fifty years for a reason, after all.

Rey nearly drops her mug as she recognizes the tall, black-haired form unfolding from the cab’s passenger seat. “Ben?” she breathes, and Obi-Wan’s eyebrows fly up, looking from her to the man and back.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” he says, rising to his feet and heading back inside. Rey moves to protest, but just as she opens her mouth she hears the lock click, so she just scowls at it instead, setting her tea on the floor and staring at her hands so she doesn’t have to watch him walk towards her.

She only glances up when she hears him climb the porch steps, stop in front of her. He’s disheveled, still wearing his tuxedo pants and a white undershirt, the nice button-down tossed over his shoulder, one hand in his pocket in what she knows is an act of casualness to hide how nervous he is.

Rey stands and stares at Ben, arms crossed. He stares back.

“I hope it’s not too late to tell you I love you too,” he says, searching her face anxiously.

“No,” she replies, smile and heart warm and blooming. “It’s not.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


End file.
